Javier Meza, chief marketing officer for the Coca-Cola Company’s portfolio of sparkling brands, talks with IRG founder Frank van den Driest. He starts by separating the company from the brand, then works through purpose, portfolio, and how a global organization decides anything.
Asked to reduce the brand to three words, he answers: optimism, upliftment, and taste.
Key findings
- The company and the brand carry different purposes. The company’s purpose is loved brands, sustainably produced, for a better shared future for all stakeholders. The brand’s purpose is lifting the human spirit toward authenticity, inclusiveness, and positivity.
- Meza’s rule for a brand entering a social debate is authenticity rather than presence. Fanta had nothing to say about social justice, because it is not what the brand stands for.
- The Coca-Cola brand did respond, but deliberately late. The company did not speak for a couple of days, and the internal answer to why was that they were thinking about what to do before what to say.
- His operating principle for a global portfolio is coordinated agility, achieved by connecting the network while keeping decision rights clear.
- On sugar, the zero-sugar portfolio has grown at double-digit rates for three years, and in the two most recent years more than half of brand growth came from zero-sugar.
What the brand is built from
Meza describes a ladder-up: a product benefit, an emotional benefit, and a role the brand plays in the world and society. The product benefit is authentic cola taste, refreshment from the carbonation, and caffeine.
The emotional benefit is mood. His argument is that a better mood makes people more open to being authentic, connecting with each other, and staying positive, which is how he gets from taste to purpose.
The company sits behind more than 400 other brands across categories, and its overall purpose is stated as refreshing the world and making a difference.
One portfolio, three purposes
Each core brand carries a purpose tied to its product experience. Fanta is built as playful, fun, and indulgent, from the bottle shape to the colors and aromas, and its purpose is infusing creativity and spontaneity into everyday life.
The example he gives of making that real is an Asian program run twice, called What the Fruit, in which three or four new Fanta flavors are launched for a limited time without telling consumers what they are.
The audiences differ. Coca-Cola targets universal appeal, which he calls hard because a brand has to be relevant to teens and parents at once. Sprite targets teenagers around self-confidence, authenticity, and honesty. Fanta targets teens and young adults, or as he puts it, the playful at heart.
The design job does not end at design. He says the challenge for marketers is not just to design brands but to bring them to life in the marketplace and in actual experiences.
Purpose, CSR, and the sustainability agenda
Meza frames sustainability through the seventeen UN Sustainable Development Goals, covering economic, social, and environmental ground together.
Under the sustainability agenda he names sugar reduction, water neutrality, packaging waste, and carbon footprint. On shared value he names employees, working rights, empowering communities, and empowering women in social justice.
The response to the social justice crisis was action before words: listening to internal people, consulting outside experts, then supplying resources to organizations fighting social injustice, and only then communicating.
The lesson he draws is plain. Just speaking does not help. You have to act, and to work out how to help before saying anything.
Interdependency by design
His starting belief is that collaboration cannot be created by goodwill. Interdependencies have to be designed, which means designing the organization for collaboration to happen.
The first lever is resource allocation. Scarcity drives creativity, and he adds that scarcity also drives collaboration, so removing resources encourages people to work together.
The second is process. Being super agile without coordination is risky for a global brand. His example is a proposal from Japan to remove labels from bottles as a symbolic waste reduction act, which he asked them to coordinate rather than launch alone.
Coordination without speed fails too. Taking three years to coordinate means losing in the marketplace, which is why he lands on coordinated agility as the balance.
The last piece is culture and trust, with rewards attached. He means rewarding with money and promotions, and publicly recognizing people working in interdependency rather than independency.
Vision, strategy, and who decides
Meza separates vision from strategy. Global marketers, he says, live in the future, and his job is to think three to five years ahead and paint that future for the organization with an imagine if.
Strategy is the bridge between present and future, and the quality of the vision determines the quality of the inspiration.
He breaks brand management into three parts: brand design, brand development, and brand activation, and says all three have to be mapped to the best people and clear decision rights.
The best people may be anywhere. Brand positioning is not decided by four or five people in Atlanta, but by reaching into the field. Problems occur when you do not have the best people or the decision rights are unclear.
Decision rights themselves are set by the senior leadership team: the chief executive, the chief operating officer, and the chief marketing officer. But he insists that design alone is not enough, because a company of that complexity cannot be run from a manual.
His illustration is bottlers telling him they do not like a campaign, where a manual is no answer. Decision rights are clear, but credibility and trust still have to be built.
Alignment, sugar, and learning
Alignment is described as a never-ending exercise rather than a meeting in January and a celebration in the summer. It is constant calibration.
It also has levels. Beliefs are aligned before programs, and when aligning programs, the objective matters more than the program itself, because otherwise the belief gets reopened again and again.
On sugar the shared objective is fewer calories per liter sold, with four options and local flexibility. Mexico reduced the sugar in classic Coca-Cola by 30 percent, while in the UK 60 percent of sales are already zero-sugar against 3 percent in Mexico.
Asked whether he is content, he says obesity is a real problem and that until it is solved he will not be okay, and that the company needs to stay open to experimenting with new solutions.
On employees speaking for the brand, his example is his own team in Brazil celebrating a German goal against Argentina during the 2014 World Cup, which he saw as forgetting that a global brand stands for universal values. His answer is continual training.
Capability building runs through a central team connecting a network of capability managers, and a routine: every two weeks markets present campaigns in a forum and receive feedback in advance.
Crucially, the forum does not take the decision away. Decision rights stay with the market unless there is a big problem, in which case he uses a veto that is rarely exercised.
Source
This page summarises Humanizing Growth Series: Javier Meza & Frank van den Driest in conversation, by Javier Meza, Frank van den Driest, 2020.